Taylor Branch on the Crisis of College Sports

Patrick Potyondy 

Welcome to History Talk, the history podcast for everyone produced by Origins. I'm your host, Patrick Potyondy. What happens when antitrust class action lawsuits meet college sports? It's a question inspired by the recent O'Bannon v. NCAA court case. This month, we've decided to get to the bottom of the current issues facing universities and college sports. In this episode of History Talk's two-part feature on the history of the NCAA, History Talk host Leticia Wiggins interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning, civil rights writer, and Atlantic magazine contributor Taylor Branch. They discuss not only the current conundrum of college sports, but also the historical trends that explain it.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

So to begin this conversation, we'd really like to ask you what you would consider the primary problem of college sports?

 

Taylor Branch 

The primary problem of college sports is that some universities, not all, a small number of universities, have started a multibillion-dollar side business using the talent of their undergraduate students, and that is a big conflict because the two worlds are separate. Now the way they've handled it so far, is through the NCAA, is to pretend that big-time college sports are part of the educational purpose, that athletes who are playing on ESPN and Fox Television, earning/generating millions of dollars, are really kind of in a different kind of classroom, and that the university is supervising them and that this is part of their educational experience, and that professionalized, commercialized sports and academics are the same thing. That's captured in the classic phrase "student athletes," that everybody who plays in these games, even if they're generating millions of dollars and people are breathless about them on television, adult announcers, that they're still student athletes, and that they're students first, and that if you look at them, in the sports business, you're depriving them of their student purpose. And so basically, what I'm saying is you can't manage conflict between academics and commercialized sport, unless you recognize that they are different. They are different in kind and that's the problem of college sports today. And I think basically, it's getting sports in trouble, because they're commercialized, and it's getting colleges in trouble too, because they're failing. They're getting corrupted by sports. It's a problem on both sides of the equation.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

What would the solution be?

 

Taylor Branch 

Well, I think basically all of us have to take our blinkers off and be reminded that there are millions of students in the United States who are working while they're in school. According to the census, about 14 million of the 20 million college students are working either full-time or part-time jobs. Nobody worries about interfering with their arrangements, whatever they can generate, whether they're a billionaire starting Facebook while they're at Harvard, or delivering pizzas, or an entrepreneur, or a musician or anything else, it's their business. Only with these few hundred thousand athletes do we say it's our business to regulate what they can and can't earn while they're working at school?

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Is it just a different focus on value of work?

 

Taylor Branch 

I think it's tradition and we've gotten into the habit of getting a great deal in our college sports, and people are attached to it. And the people who supervise college sports, that is the administrators and the coaches, want to have the athletes getting as little money as possible, even though they also want their sport to generate as much money as possible. So it's highly aggressively commercialized and yet, they're attached, for, I think, a combination of selfish reasons and brainwashed reasons, to the notion that it is a noble thing to deprive the athletes of any voice in their own enterprise. I mean the world is kind of turned upside down. The NCAA literally defines it as unethical if athletes ask for any money, if they bargain for it, if they bargain for better health care, if they bargain for safer helmets, if they bargain for a bigger stipend, so that they can pursue their education afterwards, or for anything else, it's considered unethical. They say it would exploit college athletes if they became part of a commercialized enterprise and that turns the whole meaning of the word upside down, because in ordinary speech, you exploit somebody if you don't pay them. And they've got us all believing that it would exploit players if they did have rights to bargain like anybody else, like you and I assume that we have the right to bargain for our talents in any job, but for players alone, we bar that, and we all think that something very pure is at stake and it's just because we can't see through the reality. The solution is very simple in a way. If you simply acknowledge that all the NCAA's restrictions on what college athletes can and can't do are bogus. If they amount to a collusion to prohibit those athletes from having bargaining rights to protect themselves first, things would change. I mean, college athletes would be able to bargain like anybody else, whether you're a bookstore cashier or anybody else for the value of your work. And colleges then would be forced to choose between how they're going to manage a commercial enterprise, that uses their students on the one hand, and an academic enterprise, in which the athletes that are generating all this money are also students, and they would have to make those decisions. But they don't want to. They want to have their cake and eat it too, and say that they're educating the students. Really what happens is, the students don't get a good education, or their rights, or any money. So they're exploited in both ends, often because what becomes important to the athletic departments in these big-time schools is the eligibility of the athletes, and they will compromise the education with pressure and all kinds of other things, as we've seen in so many scandals.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Well, this problem of college sports, it seems so particular to the U.S. and university sports exist elsewhere. I mean, there are clearly other models to follow, such as clubs sports abroad. Why is the U.S. such an outlier? And can we learn from these other nations in your opinion?

 

Taylor Branch 

Well, most other nations still view the universities as a place for the development of the mind, that that is a specialized function. Sports in the United States, college sports, developed uniquely right after the Civil War at a time when the rest of the world, particularly Europe, was all involved in colonizing the world, and we weren't. And what we had between the Civil War and World War One, college sports were kind of our version of developing manly obsessions on college campuses at a time when Europe was colonizing the world. And we developed football, we developed rugby, we developed baseball, we developed basketball in all those times, and they were big obsessions, and athletes themselves controlled these sports. They scheduled their own games; they did everything for the first 50 or so years. And then beginning in the NCAA era, a century ago, the universities took control of these sports and said that the athletes involved were still students and they were under student control, and they built up the myth of this kind of "halls of ivy," pure athlete who didn't care about money, but the university did. So it's an odd, unique history that evolved basically from the Civil War, and still has an awful lot of people thinking that there is something pure about college sports, because the athletes are also youthful students not encumbered by money, that they're doing it for the pure love of the sport.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Right. And that's such an interesting ideal. You see these in ads for colleges, this image of this very strong, almost like rugby player, football player. And it is kind of this interesting idealized, I mean, maybe an American ideal, in a sense, right? Of youth and intelligence?

 

Taylor Branch 

Well, it is and of course, it's interesting when you think about it even on a psychological level, because the word "amateur," which will ultimately be the last defense of the NCAA in saying that, "We have to keep control of the money and then we can't give athletes the right to bargain for themselves." That's the way it is now. It is a profoundly ambivalent word. I mean, "amateur" means pure in the sense that you love doing it. Bobby Jones is a great amateur golfer, because he would always turn down prizes, he only did it for the love. He was the greatest golfer in the world and he never took a nickel for it out of pure love. But "amateur" also means that you're no good, those guys are a bunch of amateurs, and college sports exploits that ambiguity. Nobody wants to see an amateurish Rose Bowl or college football game on national television, they want to see high performance. On the other hand, people are wedded to the notion somehow that these people are not professionalized, even though it's generating a lot of money, and we get kind of caught in that the true meaning of the word amateur. It comes from love, "amator", a lover of...you do it out of love. It states necessarily that it is a subjective choice of the person who's doing it. So that's why Bobby Jones was so noble. He chose. We still have people who can choose to be amateur golfers, and then decide to go pro and that sort of thing. But see, for college athletes, it's not a choice. It's imposed on them, they have no choice. So we're all caught up in the contradiction within the word "amateur," because we have a system now that tells these athletes, they have to be amateurs by our standards, and we're going to keep the money and we're going to do it for your own good so that you can have the blessings of amateurism. And that's corrupt, it's profoundly exploitive. And the problem is, that people don't want to deal with the underlying issues of rights, because if they did, it would be simple. It wouldn't be a factor in 90% of schools there. I think the NCAA has 1100 members. 900 of those schools, they don't have commercialized sports as they do it for fun. If they generate any revenue, it's barely breakeven and if those athletes were told that they could bargain for a salary, they wouldn't get one because there's not any money, and those sports are more of our idealized notion of sports, for their own right. But at Ohio State, and about 100 other schools, where they're generating millions and millions of dollars, it would change things profoundly if the athletes could bargain. They would bargain for more money, they would bargain for better health. They would get it, they would divert money away from coaches. The whole market is distorted and rigged by the fact that you're depriving the key talent. I mean, how do you determine who the key talent is? Where the cameras are pointed in the televised game. You don't point the cameras at the coaches who are getting all the money, you point the cameras at the players who are generating the interest. And if they had rights, it would change things profoundly.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

I didn't really notice that about the word "amateur." Just to begin with, Ohio State is definitely -

 

Taylor Branch 

The word "amateur" is where all those things come down. And the NCAA is going to insist that without its rule, we're losing amateurism, because if athletes have rights to bargain, then they will bargain. None of the college athletes...in fact, one of the biggest surprises to me in my work was that the representatives of professional athletes are so against the NCAA amateur rules, not because of what it did to them, but what the typical professional athletes that I talked to said, "I know dozens and dozens of my college classmates who thought that they were going to make it in the pros, who didn't, who lost their only chance to generate a nest egg out of something that they'd been really good at and had worked at all their life, because of these rules, and now they're ruined, and they didn't get very good education. And so I, as a professional athlete, really want to do what I can to try to get people to wake up and face the fact that we're exploiting these people by pretending that there's something noble in confining their rights."

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Looking at this discussion, currently of reform, kind of harkening back to that, what we were discussing earlier. So this is nothing new. It's been broached since the turn of the 20th century, but is there anything that's changed in this discussion? Or is it just more of the same?

 

Taylor Branch 

Well, it's changed slowly in one way, which is that 30 years ago, when the NCAA controlled all of the televised broadcasts for college football, until the '80s, the NCAA only allowed about 20 games to be broadcast every year. And when that happened, it began to be an antitrust issue, not on behalf of the students, but on behalf of the football schools, went to the Supreme Court suing the NCAA saying, "We think this is an illegal market, because it's rigging...it's keeping us from handling our own broadcast and everything has to be routed through the NCAA," and they won. And the NCAA didn't get any money out of...it only gets basketball money now, not football, and when the NCAA tried to regulate the money that coaches get, assistant coaches, it put in regulations saying they can only get so much money because the colleges were bidding up their salaries too much. The assistant coaches went to court and also sued, saying, "You can't rig the market like that," and they won, and the NCAA had to pay them. And now of course, we have assistant coaches making more than a million dollars a year, let alone head coaches. So it has become an antitrust issue in the last 30 years, but so far only for the adults and only now are the players saying look, "We're the essential people, we're the ones who are being affected most by this rigged market." So now you have a big...the O'Bannon lawsuit went to the Supreme Court and they won on their image rights thing, that the restrictions...NCAA was unfairly, and in antitrust law, depriving them of the right to bargain over their images and likenesses, that these jerseys and films of them were sold long after they even left college. And they won, and now there's another lawsuit challenging the basic amateur rules as unconstitutional under the antitrust law. So there are challenges on the basic system now, going along at the same time that recently you had an effort at Northwestern to unionize players, which is a truly bizarre concept, because if players had collective bargaining rights, the first thing they'd bump into is that under NCAA rules, they don't have any individual bargaining rights. I talked to you about this, the minute a player asks for anything, seeks better working conditions, shorter practices, anything like that, anything of tangible value, it's an ethical violation to the NCAA. So if their collective bargaining rights are sustained, which will take years and I don't know that it'll happen, other things will happen before that, they'd be the first labor pool in history to win collective bargaining rights when they don't have any individual bargaining rights.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

That's so strange.

 

Taylor Branch 

It's kind of an absurd system, but it's beginning to open people's eyes to the fact that all of these myths are harmful, and that we need to reexamine. We don't even give students, or athletes who are students, a good education to think critically about how college sports fits within the university because the amateur rules make that a taboo subject. You can't get a course at Ohio State, I guarantee there won't be courses there where athletes study what is the economic value of their work playing on the Ohio State basketball team, because it would bump into all of these taboos about how the system is working. So in that real sense, the schools are failing their basic educational purpose in the sense that this subject is dealt with entirely by mythology and fearful taboos that allow the universities to keep control of the money and keep the students from exercising rights that the rest of us take for granted.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Right. And that, what you just kind of discussed, that potential classic kind of reminds me of a two-folded question, I guess, where there's a racial dimension to all of this, as well, and I wonder if you can expand on that? And also what you just mentioned, it's also influencing higher education.

 

Taylor Branch 

Yeah, well, the higher education part is hard, because you have to be somewhat familiar with the antitrust implications in the myths of the athlete and the basic issues of rights. But the fact of the matter is that universities exist to be places for critical independent thinking about how the theoretical world impacts the practical world. On the subject of college sports, they fail that miserably. Because the universities are so nervous and tentative and defensive about their role that they don't allow open thought. I mean, it's only a few months ago that the Northwestern players were allowed by the NLRB to take a vote on whether they wanted to unionize and as soon as this happened, the whole apparatus of Northwestern came down on them saying that, "This was scary, and you don't know what you're doing. We have your best interests at heart, and this is going to ruin you, and you may lose your scholarships," and so on. They mounted a campaign against that. That's exactly the opposite of what you would hope a university would do, which is to say you have a very interesting choice to make and we're going to bring in people who can open your minds and give you information on all sides of this question like a university should. Instead of behaving like a university should, Northwestern behaved like a coal mine trying to break a miners' strike 100 years ago, and that shows the huge gap between what a university is in relation to big-time, commercial sports, and what a university ought to be in its fundamental charter to promote quality independent thought.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

By holding so dear this idea of the amateur, which is the ideal college student in some ways, colleges are becoming more almost corporate, or I don't know how to explain it, but it seems like -

 

Taylor Branch 

Yeah, they are. They are, and it's why it is important to go back to what is the nature, to the meaning of the word amateur, because who decides who is an amateur? Those questions are most basic, and we want other people to be amateurs, we don't want ourselves to be amateurs, and in fact, we don't believe that it would corrupt us to be paid for doing what we love. And every professional athlete I know says, "You can't be a good professional athlete unless you love your sport." So they love it, but that has nothing to do with whether or not they get paid for it, and somehow we convince ourselves that if athletes got paid, they would not only not love their sport that they're doing, the way we want them to love it, but that if they were getting paid, they wouldn't want to study because if somebody gets paid for doing one thing, they're not going to want to study doing something else. So we have all kinds of strange thoughts that we're willing to impose on other people, to deprive them of making their own choice. Now, you mentioned race. There is a racial element in this, but I think people have to be careful about it, because these amateur rules were adopted by the NCAA. I mean, the formative...the NCAA until the 1950s, had absolutely no power to do anything. They didn't even have full-time employees. They didn't get their first full-time employee until 1951. They didn't have an office. So it was only with the rise of television after World War Two, really, after the Korean War, that the NCAA got all this money and began enforcing these amateur rules. In 1950, when that began, there were very few black college players in college sports. In fact, many schools were still segregated and so the rules were not applied with a racial bias at all. The University of Texas won the National Football Championship in 1969, with a team of 95 players who were all white. Nowadays, the sport is predominantly black, but that's a recent phenomenon, and young people today need to be reminded that even college basketball was largely white through the 1960s. It was a big deal in 1966, when the traditional all-white powerhouse from Kentucky lost to a team from El Paso, Texas that had five black players. It so enraged Adolph Rupp, the coach of Kentucky, that he banned...he was on the rules committee and he was instrumental in banning the dunk shot. He was so mortified that he had lost to black players, he was a traditional segregationist, that for eight years, you couldn't dunk in college basketball because it was seen as something that black players were really good at and white coaches didn't like it. But this shows that the racial element of amateur rules wasn't...there wasn't a racial motive. The amateur rules predated the predominance of black athletes in college sports. Having said that, though, the deprivation of rights now really falls heavily against, particularly the skill positions in big-time college football and basketball are disproportionately African American, and so you do have an awful lot of African American players, from poor families, who have a hard time eating or traveling home under scholarship restrictions by the NCAA at a time when they're generating millions of dollars for their school. And race could be a factor in people's unwillingness or their resistance to deal with the underlying issues of equity and fairness, which people are always bouncing off of. They always want to say, "Well, if players had rights, it would ruin college sports," or it would do this, that, or the other, and when they do that, they forget basic principles of almost constitutional law. You begin with questions of rights and adjust everything else. To begin with what might be inconvenient, or what you can't foresee, or changes you don't foresee, and as a way of avoiding rights, is the path to corruption. I mean, you gotta start with the rights first and figure out what's fair, and then make adjustments from there to accomplish your other goals.

 

Taylor Branch 

And so as a civil rights historian, what do you see as the greatest common factor between like the civil rights movement and the current motions against the NCAA and problem of college sports?

 

Taylor Branch 

Yeah. Well, I think there is a similarity, psychologically, in people's attitudes. The resistance to think clearly and face squarely the underlying issues of rights. In the civil rights era, very, very few people, even at a time when segregation was established, when it was in the constitutions of southern states, when there wasn't a single elected official in the 17 southern states, as late as the early 1960s, that advocated repealing the segregation laws, they were the established thing. People did not want to deal with those basic issues. They wanted to deal with what would happen if you change segregation. They wanted to deal with the chaos that it might cause, the fear that it might cause, the trouble making that it might cause. Very few people spoke directly to Martin Luther King and said, "I disagree with you on principle for the following reasons. Segregation is right and your freedom movement is wrong on principle. And this is my argument." What they did instead was to say, "Well, you may be right, but you shouldn't be breaking the law, you shouldn't be having demonstrations, you shouldn't involve...you're causing strife, you're causing harm." In the civil rights era around race, which is also true in this Civil War period of the abolitionists who wanted to deal with the underlying principles and rights of slavery, people hated abolitionists not because they thought they were wrong, but because they feared they were right. They didn't want to deal with it, so they dealt with the consequences, the side issues. "You abolitionists are terrible, because you're going to cause friction with our southern states, you're going to drive up the price of cotton, you're going to make people angry," so on and so forth. So what civil slavery and the civil rights era in the '60s both have in common with thinking about college sports today is that people tend to bounce off the underlying questions of rights to deal with something else. And that's really something that is more convenient, or something they recoil from it, and that is a telltale sign that something's wrong, and that they don't want to deal with the questions of rights, because eventually, that's what you're going to have to do if this is going to be fair. Ironically, big-time college sports, in addition to all of these questions of rights that I've mentioned, in the antitrust suits and the union movements and the protests by the athletes themselves that are just beginning, big-time college sports is really coming apart more over in quarrels over money between the schools that are making a lot of money, the ones that just changed the rules of the NCAA, and the ones that are getting some of that money but not earning it. So in a sad way, the unity of college sports is breaking apart in squabbles over money from between the ones who have a lot of it and the ones who don't have very much. You can see that happening. Every member, all 1100 members of the NCAA, get a subsidy from the NCAA, which is reaped. 95% of their budget is generated by the fact that they still control the TV rights for March Madness and that money is generated by the big-time schools, Ohio State's one of them there, they tend to be in the NCAA tournament, along with Florida, and the big football schools and the big basketball schools have a heavy overlap, but that money is taken through the NCAA for basketball and distributed among 1000 schools that have a stake in it. And the big schools don't like it and they want to keep all of their money. "Why should we have to share it with Hofstra," and so a lot of this is coming apart in a thieves' quarrel over how to divide the spoils that have been reaped from the rules that deprive college athletes of their fair share. To fix our universities, we have to think clearly about it in every respect, from whether the education it's giving is pertinent and whether the tuition loads are too big to what is the balance with the world of sports, as made clear by the sports right there on the campus that you can look at and study and learn from.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Thank you so much for that tie-in to end things on and we really appreciate you joining us today, Taylor.

 

Taylor Branch 

Thank you very much.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

This edition of the Origins podcast, History Talk, was brought to you by the Public History Initiative and the Goldberg Center in the history department at The Ohio State University. Our main editors are Steven Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley. Our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer. Our audio producers and hosts are Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins. You can find our podcasts and more at our website, origins.osu.edu, on iTunes, and on SoundCloud. And as always, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Thank you for listening.